Google

Some of the news of the week has to do with eBay deciding mobile advertising doesn’t work for them as it clutters small screens and doesn’t provide that much revenue. This seems to make sense but if you think this in any way is going to change the impact of mobile advertising and commerce you are dead wrong.

Logic and rumors tell us Amazon will be releasing a telephone soon and the reasoning for them to do so goes far beyond expanding its ecosystem and pushing people to download apps and watch videos online.

Samsung to show flexible screens are coming to a smartphone and tablet near you but what still needs to be worked out is how to get multicore processors and batteries to bend along with them. Moreover, what happens when you bend them too far – do they just snap, pouring the guts of the battery onto your lap or dinner plate? We still have some time on this tech but the progress is promising. Can’t wait to see it (and bend it) at CES.

Tom Keating at TMC reported today that Samsung is beating virtually everyone at virtually everything. He discusses how they have become the dominant TV maker but this isn’t such big news at this point. What is interesting is the company replaced Nokia as the number one producer of cellphones – not a huge surprise at this point but a huge milestone as Nokia held the coveted top spot for 13 years.

Why is Apple, a company with more consumer loyalty than just about any other company being threatened by Samsung?

Cisco recently appointed Barclays to help it auction off Linksys – a move consistent with the company’s desire to exit low-margin consumer businesses as it looks to invest in high-margin areas like software and services. But as the saying goes, one man’s garbage is another man’s gold. Linksys is indeed a treasure to the right partner like Google or even Samsung.

The reason is simple – both companies need to blunt the move by Apple into the home and entertainment is the future of technology as consumer technology trends coupled with BYOD turn into corporate success.

Amazon Prime Instant Video app for iOS is out and in my testing on a 4th generation iPad it worked well. Some complaints remain that for non-Prime users the experience isn’t that great. I for one would like to be able to download video on the app – there is a download area but no instructions as to what is downloadable or how to download.

Alcatel Lucent says providing video to devices is a great new revenue opportunity for carriers.

Google is under public pressure to pay more taxes as the news of it “funneling” $9.8B of its revenue to Bermuda helped it halve its tax bill. The pressure is coming from the US and Europe. I find it ironic that Google Chairman Eric Schmidt is such an ardent Obama supporter as our President seems to be singularly focused on getting anyone who can afford it to pay more taxes. Before you get bent out of shape regarding what Google has done, remember that every company has to do its best to maximize profit and this means looking for every legal way possible to minimize taxes.

The home delivery market could be huge as predicted back in the dotcom days when companies like WebVan and Peapod were springing up faster than Android produces device variants today. Who comes to mind when you think of home delivery in the world of tech? Certainly Amazon, Google and more recently Wal-Mart.

At the inaugural WebRTC Conference & Expo in San Francisco, much of the crowd was focused on demos of WebRTC working in a production environment. In one example at a luncheon keynote Mozilla showed how WebRTC communications could take place between two browsers on the same laptop. This one of the first demonstrations of the technology much of the audience had ever seen.

The event has brought together a wide swath of technology companies like Google, Plantronics, Oracle, Sangoma and Ericsson who are all very optimistic about the potential for WebRTC to be as some describe it, “A once in a lifetime opportunity in telecom.”

There are few technologies in telecom which seem to have generated as much excitement as WebRTC – VoIP and SIP come to mind as two others.

With WebRTC, every web browser becomes a communications server. It really is a fundamental shift in how communications systems work.

I apologize in advance for the self-promotion but I feel it is very important to share the following news with you. A few months back TMC co-launched an event in the space called WebRTC Conference & Expo and we have been happily surprised by the top sponsors and conferees who have signed up - very quickly.

Some time back I commented on rumors of a Sprint takeover by Google and at the time many thought the idea was crazy. Fast forward a few years, tens of thousands of Android devices and a Motorola Mobility acquisition later and now Google is reportedly in talks to launch a wireless service with a number of companies including Dish Networks. As you may recall, Steve Jobs too wanted to launch a wireless network and if Google is seriously exploring this option this means Apple has to be doing the same.

The next frontier of advertising revenue for Google is mobile and if carriers and Apple decide to lock the company out of this lucrative market (even partially), then they have no choice but to own the wireless pipes.